An embodiment relates curb/road boundary detection of a traveled route. Curbs are important cues identifying the boundary of a roadway. Their detection is required by many automotive features such as evasive collision avoidance, lane centering, and curve speed warning (by providing road curvature definition). Due to the large variability in curb appearance and the surrounding world (weather, illumination, moving objects) their detection is a challenging task.
Different sensor such as mono cameras, stereo cameras, lidar sensors and their combination, can be used to detect curbs. The difficulty of the curb detection problem crucially depends on the sensor. Both mono and stereo camera systems largely depend on illumination conditions and suffer from illumination. Lidar being less dependent on illumination and providing accurate 3D information differ in resolution and in the sparsity of the captured 3D point clouds.
Curbs can be “reliably” detected using dense point clouds obtained with the Velodyne sensor, but Velodyne sensor is very expensive and is used mainly for surveying (mapping) the environment. Currently, there is no a sensor on the automotive market with the same resolution.